Changes to the Giant Bomb API

Howdy folks. As our subscribers know, we've been furiously working away on the new site and should see it launch later this month. Testing has gone very well and you guys have been great finding all kinds of ways to break things in clever ways. One place we haven't had much testing though is in our public API, which also got an overhaul along with the site itself. If you're using our API I highly suggest testing your apps against the beta site in the next two weeks and giving us some feedback.

The main things to know are this.

• Your api keys will stay the same.
• The new API is almost a pure mirror of the delivery style of the old one.
• The mapping to the content types has changed slightly. You'll need to adjust your apps for this once we launch. It should be a quick fix. Essentially urls that were /character/1/?api_key=<APIKEY> are now /character/3005-1/?api_key=<APIKEY>

API users will be able to access the beta site later today

Right now only subscribers can get into the beta, but we're also opening this up to API users this afternoon. You can access the new API docs here (http://seaserpent.giantbomb.com/api/). You can talk with the developers of the new API on the forums here(http://seaserpent.giantbomb.com/forums/). We didn't change much because we wanted to maintain compatibility with everyones old apps, but going forward, we'd love to get some dev feedback so we can move that product forward.

Note that only API users who signed up for a key previous to January 3rd will have access. Generating a new key now won't backdoor you in, so don't bother trying :)

Hey we're hiring engineers

Also, while I have you nerds at attention. Giantbomb / Comic Vine / CBSi is hiring engineers. We're looking for experienced duders familiar with running large dynamic sites like these, but more than just that have a passion for gaming and a willingness to learn new tech. Those lucky candidates who make it through will get to work in San Francisco and learn that Alexis and I aren't the only people that actually build this thing. You'll get to work with @mrpibb,@idBloc and @rchen. All of whom are much better at Star Craft and some of whom speak fluent French. If you're interested send an email to our lead engineer danny.chi@cbsinteractive.com. We're primarily a PHP (Symfony2) shop these days, but work with lots of NoSQL / Node as well. We mostly need experienced backend engineers, but if you're a Javascript nerd feel free to contact us as well.

Dat api

I was gonna whip up a cool little thing with the api but the docs link is 404ing. Please send help!

I want to be inside you. Hire me.

EDIT: Please don't actually hire me.

cool dude. now if I could find the time to work on that side project I've been meaning to work on. :) Also, glad to see that work is being put into the API.

@mumphster said:

I was gonna whip up a cool little thing with the api but the docs link is 404ing. Please send help!

Fixed.

Ugh, hurry up and finish degree I am working toward, I want to start doing this kind of stuff!!!

Filed under Baldness. HA!

I'm available for hire. ;) If you need someone to laugh at your jokes, I'm that guy.

If only Quebec City wasen't so far way and my budget so tight right now... that could have been an awesome opportunity!

I can at least spread the word around !

@snide When are you hiring me as official Giant Bomb brewmaster? I do requests!

@Brewmaster_Andy said:

@snide When are you hiring me as official Giant Bomb brewmaster? I do requests!

The time for that was when we had a bar in the office. Sadly... no longer the case!

I have no formal training in coding. I'm not even an engineer, I'm a philologist. But if you want to pay me to hang around the Giant Bomb offices, I would gladly make the sacrifice. For the greater good, you know.

Just don't make me visit the Comic Vine forums. Please.

I'd apply, but PHP is such a fail. (also, other side of the world)

oh god i don't understand any of these words

@eloj: I used to really love PHP, but I've been spoiled by C#/MVC. No experience with Symfony2, which might be a nice framework though. But Node though... that gets me hot. Too bad I could never convince my wife to move to SF. =[

I really hope you're being careful with your NoSQL implementation, especially if you're using MongoDB. I work as a sys admin and i'm getting a growing number of calls from companies in trouble over the last 6 months.

Neat

It's times like these when I wish I had majored in Computer Science instead of history

and also that I lived in San Fran and not Vancouver

When I first looked at that photo, I thought it was a movie that contained both young Alec Baldwin and a Bill Murray pretending to be balding before he actually was, both pretending to be engineers or architects or something, and was like, "What? I should know that movie..." after zooming in, I believe I have determined that neither Alec Baldwin nor Bill Murray were actually in the photo.

They're hiring new people!

They will ruin everything we love about the site!

Again!

@clientkiller said:

I really hope you're being careful with your NoSQL implementation, especially if you're using MongoDB. I work as a sys admin and i'm getting a growing number of calls from companies in trouble over the last 6 months.

There's no mongo in the new site. In the live, current one we used it for some analytics stuff and it worked great. We do you a lot of Redis in both implementations though, which has been fantastic.

How will this affect the Boxee and Roku apps? Will those be updated as needed to continue working with the new site?

Now I can't help you with any tech stuff, but if you need a british teenager to walk around the office and record a 24/7 documentary of the office, i'm your guy.

Oh. Hiring engineers. I was really hoping to start a 1000 reply "Save Rorie" thread.

Cool glad to see things are going well.

@Knite said:

They're hiring new people!

They will ruin everything we love about the site!

Again!

And again and again! It never stops! Over and over! Again and again!

@Toxin066: I bet Rorie would be a great engineer! Imagine all the puppies involved. Puppy Giant Bomb, puppy slave labor, puppies on puppies on puppies

I miss Rorie so much.

i will accept minimum wage to sit there and yell about hacking the gibson and diving the ultranet and stuff, making you feel like an elite hacker, and therefore increasing productivity. itll be cheaper than actually increasing staff.

Learn how to build websites and move to SF so I can work with GB?.... hmm, tempting. But unlikely. :(

@Sweep said:

I want to be inside you. Hire me.

EDIT: Please don't actually hire me.

Hire this man. Now!

says forbidden when I login.

Yeah, so, if I lived in SF I'd be all about this.

But I don't. And, I know that my wife would never want to move, so. ;)

Call me when you need a logistics guy. I know everything about stock planning and service levels. No? Ok then.

@snide: awesome! I'm sure you guys know what you're doing :-) Mongo isn't bad, it just gets very difficult to deal with once file sizes get very large and the auto sharding can cause problems if you're not careful with it. Redis is pretty sweet and can do loads of cool things, although i'm still leaning towards memcachd + beanstalkd + nginx combo. I prefer small flexible components and tend to also steer away from full stack web development and focus on small service APIs. The upsurge in Composer usage has made managing dozens of small services much easier also.

I hope you get time to do more designer live streams in the future. Would love to get the chance to talk more about what goes on in the running of your sites.

@MrGtD said:

oh god i don't understand any of these words

Glad I'm not the only one!

If anyone here doesn't know what an API is, I can sell them one at half-price so they can maximize their Giantbomb content experience.

I think I understand some of these words.

I wonder how much the js job pays.

Good luck, potential engineering duders.

@langdonx: Symfony2 increases PHP standards; which can't be a bad thing :p

I'd work for Giant Bomb/CBSi if I was qualified, but I hear you all have a history of sexual harassment at the office.

@ZombiePie said:

I'd work for Giant Bomb/CBSi if I was qualified, but I hear you all have a history of sexual harassment at the office.

The GOOD KIND of sexual harassment??

I wish I could work for you guys.

@ZombiePie: sounds like sexual harassment panda needs to take a trip to the office.

Oh man. I wish that I didn't hate web design and lived in Cali. Working for the GB crew would be rad.

I still can't believe the site had to go from the awesome language of Python to PHP.

When are you all going to start hiring new staff writers or at least a copy editor? Too many punctuation and spelling errors on this site.

I'm an electronics engineer!  Surely you can find a place for me.   :) 

@Ben_H said:

Ugh, hurry up and finish degree I am working toward, I want to start doing this kind of stuff!!!

We also take minions.. err I mean interns.

Start hiring video people. I know Vinny and Drew can use the help!